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SuperBiasedMan

Idle Fiction Jam - Rumours and Hearsay

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I am almost finished.

 

I have been trying to have all the action happen in present tense, which is hard to do for me as I am so ingrained in it being my voice relaying the voice of another.

 

After this one though, I am definitely going to try my hand at a comedy.

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So, I finished the first draft just now and have done a rudimentary spell check but I think this one is very rough around the edges:

 

https://medium.com/@twmac/a-person-shaped-thing-is-a-person-6148086906da#.m6bldr5y2

 

This is a really great interpretation of the prompt. Some of the dialogue I thought could use contractions to make it flow a bit better as you're already using abbreviations like 'cos', so you'd think those guys would also shortcut something like "he was" to "he's". But I assume that kind of thing may come with further drafts. I'll keep an eye out to see how this evolves but if this is the starting foundations it's very strong!

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I might need to cut out that "'cos" because it made sense when I was going to give Trevor a different voice.

 

That said will look into the contractions anyway.

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I don't feel like he has much of a voice right now. His PoV comes across as quite clean & organised for (my assumption) bloke who goes off to the men's club/pub on the same days of every week.

I was going to suggest more contractions and colloquialisms even in his inner voice. 

 

The other thing I'm struggling to phrase is that his inner voice rattles off a lot of detail about friends, places, things; but maybe not the right details? I'm not sure if it's just a personal flavour thing though.

 

I guess an example could be here "Now, I’ve never met her, but when we first started drinking together Trevor talked about her a lot, what they did, where they went, but things had changed as of recent and he talked about her less." and instead there could be something like "Back in the day you could hardly shut up Trev over the stories he told of what him and his wife would get up to. I never met his lady but she seemed like a remarkable woman. Lately though I've been wondering if they're having a bit of trouble. The tight look on Trev's face (as I ask) doesn't look to be proving my suspicions wrong."

 

Anyway just my thoughts.

 

Oh one more thing. Did you intentionally choose a passive voice? I assumed it was a style thing you were going for but as you're also talking about trying to movie into a first person pov and that you're pretty ingrained in 3rd person writing; you might not be deliberately muting the action by using passive voice? Sorry if that doesn't come out right it's been a long day.

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All useful info.

 

The point of him talking about details but getting them wrong or not really knowing is an illustration of the kind of relationship that he is now in, and that Trevor finds himself in too. These people are friends in a very old fashioned English way. They'll talk about football and play draughts (checkers) but really, they don't know anything about each other and are absolutely not the people you should be calling when you are in trouble. These people hardly talk about their lives to each other, unless it is one where they can place themselves in a position of power (especially in Trevor's case). For Trevor, being the age that he is, he doesn't have a lot of options and his pride his blocking him reaching out to his family (this is alluded to a bit when they talk about their finances).

 

The ending is supposed to be bitter sweet because when Arnold 'Noidy' makes one attempt at connection he is rebuffed. You'll laugh or cry depending on the perspective.

 

The passive voice was an attempt at something different but it was definitely also an attempt to almost mute the events. Will try and give him a bit more of an inner voice but I am worried that if I do, the whole short story would be engulfed in colloquialisms.

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Guess I'm talking at cross purposes now. It might still be because I'm tired but that's not coming through to me, but I think I do get the spirit of what you're talking about. The kind of Raymond Carver vibe; people trapped in their own conventions, masculinity, etc.

 

Edit: What I mean is that I saw the outlines but for me the text didn't fill it in too well for me but that might be for the delivery that I've come to expect/assume from those kinds of stories. It's a flavour issue I mean.

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Yeah, the mileage seems to vary. A lot of people I have sent this to have not even blinked at the stumbling mess that are the people in this. But the girlfriend of a friend (she is from South America) thought it was funny but unbelievable 'because no friends act like that'.

 

My mother kind of hated it but that is because it is loosely based on my own grandmother, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimers, and she felt that all the characters were unsympathetic. In real life my grandparents are very friendly and nice so I had to explain that some of the events are inspired by real life but the characters most definitely are not.

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Soooo, has anyone else finished a piece?

 

Would hate for this die on its arse on the second entry.

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I've been trying to find the right shape for a story. It's going to be pretty different from the ideas I first had, but from what I ran through in my head the other day it seems to flow a lot better than what I was going to have before. Just wish that it'd all come out while I had a pen near by.

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I have tweaked mine a bit more and added some extra dialogue, removed one of the references to 'loopy' as it was felt to be a bit callous, as well as changed a few bad mistakes (like the fact that Noidy and Trevor both have wives with the same name - whoops).

 

Apart from a few other tweaks I am unlikely to change much, Mawd thank you for your earlier criticism. Not sure I have addressed it properly but I tried.

 

I look forward to reading your entries!

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Hello everyone. twmacb successfully encouraged me to get involved in the jam, so here's a thing that I have written. 

 

https://medium.com/@ShaunCG/a-person-shaped-thing-is-a-person-5d37ebfdcd0b#.q84zvoooi

 

Interested to hear what people think. I'd have liked to have done more but I've pretty much run out of time to work on this, so here it is, warts and all. 

 

Looking forward to reading more entries! It was a good title; I almost went in a completely different direction, something in the vein of Midwich Cuckoos or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 

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I rambled about this while we were playing Titanfall, but I thought I would reiterate that I really liked this piece as it does a good job of being impartial in its treatment. I especially liked the part from the left leaning pensioner.

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I've been way too quiet on here. During holidays I got nothing done, thought I'd get some dragting and ideas at least. Since then I was unsure what I wanted to do with it. In the end, I just ran with those dice things I posted about and wrote as I went. I literally figured out the end right as I came to it. It's more jokey than my last one, hopefully it works well.

A Person Shaped Thing is a Person

 

Looking forward to reading stories. I quickly read yours twmac but want to give it a proper read and response now that mine's done. And welcome ShaunCG, hope you had fun with it. :)

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I liked it, however, I think I would have preferred it if I had know as little as the two detectives.
 
As the audience I already know the reveal way before the protagnists and I think it would have been more fun to be able to deduce that from their analysis of the victim without having the you fill in the blanks so early on. For example:
 

You could have had them note that it is missing an important limb and that there appeared to be no traces of b lood in the body and instead there was only plastic, even maybe had a false conclusion like "the suspect must have fully drained them of  their blood, we might be looking at a... my database says 'vampire'"

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@SuperBiasedMan: 

 

That was fun. I liked the ending! 

 

Like twmacb I thought it would've been stronger had it not been clear from the outset what the victim was. Figuring it out would be easy and add to the joke. But the ending comes enough out of leftfield that I think it works whether or not you make the nature of it super obvious from the get-go. 

 

I feel like you could get some mileage out of the two bots having different purposes and working at cross-purposes to each other. E.g:

 


The medical bot's diagnosis is that the patient is deceased, and the detective immediately begins an interrogation. It feels like there's opportunity for humour from MED-e's perspective there. Similarly, DeTECT is the one who identifies the victim as human, and you could have MED-e extrapolating from that data in... fanciful ways.



 

Thanks also for the welcome. :) It was indeed fun! 

 

@twmacb: 

 

Thanks again, man. Much appreciated! 

 

Similarly you already know my thoughts on your take of this month's theme, but to reiterate for the thread's benefit: I like the voice, I like the tense, I think both fit the story well. 

 

The emotionally reserved characters feel authentic to me; British men of older generations weren't particularly open about any aspects of their private lives, so I can accept these people knowing each other for years, being friends of a sort, and yet knowing next to nothing about one another. 

 

I expected the story to leap in a fantastical direction of some sort, and so the actual conclusion was a little sad, an everyday tragedy. But the final line alleviates that with a bit of humour. It's good! 

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Oh wow, this is what second drafts are for but you're both so right about making it a reveal. When I wrote it for the audience to know the whole time, I wasn't intending for the characters to realise it at all. But as I approached the end, I realised it'd be a good capper. Going back, there'd definitely be a lot of fun to have with that ambiguity, and teasing out what's going on. 

 

@ShaunCG I also like the idea of their purposes being accidentally opposed. I wanted a dynamic where MED-e is just a naive sidekick, blindly following the nonsensical conclusions being drawn. But I think your idea could totally add a fun layer onto that, where they're pulling against each other in a non antagonistic way, and MED-e is just struggling to make their observations coherent.

 

@twmac
This had a really nice solid mood to it. It got into the auld lad feel really well, particularly with the banter. I'm surprised someone saw the people as unsympathetic or wouldn't act this way, the stiff social interactions felt really real to me. Even as someone who's not an old pensionser. :P

 

One thing was that you could maybe edit the text to make something read the way it should in the conversation. Specifically this line breezes by a bit quickly:
 

“Shame, terrible shame.” Benny mutters.

“Yeah.” I say. “Did you see Spurs play last night?”

“Oh, don’t get me started, they were off their game. Midfielders were a mess.” Benny pipes up.

 

The line in the middle could be split up more. Even without spelling out a big silence, give the reader a forced pause so that in their head they can hear the beat between those two moments. Otherwise it feels like a more rushed line, which I don't think was the intention. 

 

@ShaunCG

This was a really nice series of vignettes. One thing I love in writing, is getting to see someone's personal point of view close up. And the overall narrative of the piece was nice too, particularly the way you linked all these individuals together with devices that show they aren't just isolated individuals but people in a community.


I don't know if anyone else got this, but it did take me a bit to clearly read it was a new person in the second passage. I briefly thought it was the same character, just now in a shop with the delivery man, but I got it halfway through and then understood for the rest of them. I think with that kind of shift, having it very obvious early the first time helps so the reader just gets it for the rest of the piece.

 

 

I can update the first post thoroughly with our entries later, but for now I can announce that the new theme is "Readers Like You". This has plenty of chance to be meta, and I already had a goofy idea for how to approach it so it should be fun. :P 

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Definitely, will change that line and draw it out. That bit was thrown in there a bit last minute after some feedback, will fix.

 

Readers Like You...  Hmmm going to have to think that one over.

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I have a weird idea for a starting point on this. On the Thumbs recently, they read a Batman episode summary, it was semi auto generated. It's an algorithm that reads source texts and can output suggestions of what words to put out, which a human then chooses leading to a new set of suggestions.

Given the "reader" in the title, I want to use Thumbs episodes and Jane Eyre as sources, then see what possibly coherent thing I can write with this algorithm. It'll obviously be a first draft, but it's a fun way of trying to get inspiration so I hope I can pull it off.

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Readers Like You, eh? That suggests a broad swathe of possibilities. I might go for something fun, after my fairly depressing take on the last title. I guess we'll have to see what fey mood takes me! 

 


Thanks for your feedback on my story, SuperBiasedMan! Good point about the shift in perspective not being immediately obvious; someone else has mentioned this to me as well.

 

I'm glad you liked the vignettes and the way they were connected. Had I not run out of time, the latter few would've been better connected... 

 

Good luck with the pseudo-random generation approach; that should produce something amusing at the very least. 

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I did some early testing with pseudo random generation and I've been having fun with it. I got a paragraph out of it that I like, after a few runs with it. I feel like getting used to it helps me figure out what are good words to choose. Sometimes I accidentally wrap around to a bunch of prepositions, which are less interesting than a bunch of adjectives or verbs. I'm not sure how much the Jane Eyre is coming out, it feels like that just bursts in occasionally to what's otherwise a very Thumbs-y, but I might play with weights to see if I can fix that.

 

the first time i was too late , it was a quiet little bit of love. and jake is feared for what we all have , a video. but what if you hadnt gone over my goof? the future of games journalism never forgets , and jake stares . you are not the greatest but you cannot even assemble a little girl !

you will master this lore of video games , this world of bespoke puzzles , the idle thumbs podcast. with special annoyance , displeasure and nick , sean can give you strength to choose some dresses. this time reader , could steve hear scoops about three antidotes? i considered an oeuvre of my brother rowland , all sorts of oldfashioned. with your usual acuteness of something and his feelings on borderlands , i know my lips are still working.

 

(Also even though it's tonally inappropriate I am entirely reading this in the voice Chris used for reading the Batman thing on the cast)

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I did some early testing with pseudo random generation and I've been having fun with it. I got a paragraph out of it that I like, after a few runs with it.

 

What kind of method are you using to do this? Is there some web based tool or are you having to code your own?

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hmmm I guess I could install python even though I don't/won't be needing it for work and I have an (irrational, I know I know) bias against significant whitespace.

I had been working on my own javascript based one (lots of code stolen but just running it off a single file, locally so I wouldn't be hosting it anywhere) but wasn't entirely satisfied with the results. That may be down to choice of corpus though, really (In a fit of supreme narcissism I'd decided a good idea would be to feed it all my own previous writing scrunched together).

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